Bob Vylan were on rousing form following a successful tour, neither being harmed or cowed by the establishment backlash against them, reports Trent Loom

An excellent start to what proceeded to be a great festive season weekend, Bob Vylan were on fine form on Thursday evening in Brum. Support-band Native James were a rousing warm-up act, albeit somewhat of a young blood version of Skindred.

Nonetheless, from where we were positioned on the upper balcony, we witnessed them inspiring some riotous warrior dance with en masse circle audience participation, in addition to splitting the audience in half, prior to their prompting some full-on dance charge clashes from the crowd, which were all great fun to observe from above and so there was a fantastic atmosphere to boot!

Next up, roadies removed the drapes from their impressive PA stack and Bob Vylan took to the stage to much applause! Of course as a live act (and call me old fashioned in this regard should you wish to), it’s always a bit disappointing to observe an entire guitar set performed via a backing tape, but it did sound very powerful and was certainly complimented by the live drum and percussion performance, courtesy of little Bob!

Meanwhile frontman Bobby Vylan immediately had the audience in the palms of his hands. He was keen to gauge how many present had seen them before and how many had bought tickets off of the back of their now infamous summer Glastonbury Festival performance.

A show of hands revealed that the audience were roughly divided along the lines of two thirds for the former and a third for the latter, thus a chant of ‘Death! Death! To the IDF’ from the audience was an instantaneous inevitability thereafter!

It has to be said that as a punk-rap protest-music act, Bob Vylan’s crash course live Glasto performance encounter with the BBC has done them no harm whatsoever, even if it did subsequently result in their facing two separate criminal case investigations from the police.

Bobby Vylan conceded it had been quite the year in their professional career, commencing with an Australian tour supporting Amyl and the Sniffers, a jaunt around the summer festival circuit to include Coachella in the USA and then their pro-Palestine stand at Glastonbury.

Their criminal investigation by the Met ensued after historic film footage surfaced of a ‘Death to the IDF’ chant originally being chanted when they had supported Iggy Pop early in the summer. Bobby Vylan cast blame for this on the tabloid press passing it on to the cops subsequently, irrespective of the fact that ‘No one gave a shit about it back then!’

Fortunately, the Met subsequently dropped all charges against the band, although their criminal investigation with Somerset and Avon Police remains outstanding and unresolved. Only time will tell whether pro-Israeli pressure will be brought to bear on the matter.

In the interim, and on what was their final gig of 2025, Bob Vylan were determined to address each and every social ill in contemporary society which came to their minds and to that end, there was much to criticise, including the rise of the far right, the nefarious nature of anti-woke sentiment in the ever-reactionary tabloid press and of course, the pathetic failings of Starmer’s allegedly left-wing Labour Party.

Before they had put the world to rights and gained a standing ovation from their (much enamoured) audience for doing so, Bobby Vylan also demonstrated that he was no fool when it came to which causes he should or should not be championing, at the risk of there being undercover cops present at one of their gigs of an evening.

As a consequence, he was very keen to utilise his own platform by sharing it with others as appropriate and to that end, following an encore characterised by his latterly crowd surfing and singing amidst the audience itself, he passed his mic to an activist fan who gave voice to the ongoing plight and injustice endured by the Palestine Action Filton 24 hunger strikers. In conclusion, Bob Vylan performed an excellent set, characterised by a need for humility and social justice within a world in which those attributes have often been sadly lacking around the globe, throughout 2025.

‘FREE! FREE! PALESTINE!’